March 26, 2004

Lunch Break

This past weekend, some friends and I took part in another weekend film competition, the 48 hour Film Project. It’s basically set up the same way as the National Film Challenge that we entered in October, which brought forth our first short film, Dial-a-Spy. At 7pm on Friday we were given a genre, character, line of dialogue, and a prop, all of which must be represented in the final 4-8 minute film and be delivered on Sunday at 7pm. Once again, this was a tremendous undertaking. I managed to snag a total of 4 hours worth of sleep, and I was one of the luckier ones. This is what we ended up with:

Genre - Western or Musical

Character - M. Drake, Magician

Line of Dialogue - “Get a move on, there’s no time to lose”.

Prop - Rolodex of cards

That’s right, Western or Musical. The two genres that are so bad they decided to lump them together to give you a choice between the lesser of two evils. We did not have the luxury of a musical score like we did in Dial-a-Spy, so any ideas of doing a Musical were quickly left behind.

Western it was! So, what do you do when you have less time and fewer people to make a film? Why, you make a longer and more complicated film of course! 48 hours and about 5 gallons of coffee later we had ourselves a short film. It’s really weird how much stuff makes sense to you when you are deprived of sleep. When we wrote it, I swear our film made sense. We actually had too much footage. There were scenes that we cut out! The final product however turned into some sort of avant-garde, modern day western thing (or at least that is what I have been telling myself to justify the story’s ends not entirely meeting). But hey, don’t take my word for it, make a game of it! It’s open to interpretation! What’s more, this marks my on-screen debut… and I know we were all waiting for that.

So, without further explanation, I give you Lunch Break. Do yourself a favor, watch the film, then read what it is really about below.

Did you watch the film first? Ok, good, then read on…

Film Concept:Bill keeps blacking out. Every time he wakes up he finds himself in a peculiar position without any memory of how he got there. It turns out Bill was bitten by a mysterious cowgirl and is now doomed to turn into a cowboy everyday at high noon.

I thought this movie was hilarious and very, very creative (especially given the genre you were given)! I think with a better. more coherenet ending, there would have been no problem understanding what the movie was about.